Musings as I gaze through the windows of my office down the grand walkway...

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Why So Many Schools Remain Penitentiaries of Boredom

I thought that my readers might enjoy this posting by Elizabeth English, the Head of School at The Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles, California.

I don't know that all schools are "Penitentiaries of Boredom," but I do know that we must re-envision schools to be more in step with our current ways of doing business and culture. If schools are no longer the holders and deliverers of knowledge, what is their new role in this century? If the work place is no longer a factory, do we need to educate a populace to work in them? What will the jobs of the future look like, and what skills will our students need?

Read Elizabeth's posting and see what you think...

Why So Many Schools Remain Penitentiaries of Boredom

"It's
harder to change a school than it is to move a graveyard." Or, as it's
also been said, "It's harder to change a history course than it is to
change history." I think we can all agree that our schools should be among
our most dynamic and innovative institutions; but despite the endless talk
about school reform, they remain among our most ossified.

Take
a look at the typical American classroom, public or independent, urban or
suburban, and what you will see looks very much like the classrooms of the 19th
century. Yes, slates have been replaced (in most places) with digital tools,
but the structure signals the musty past: teacher as authoritative source of
knowledge, student as tabula rasa. Or take the structure of the school day
itself, typically divided into seven 45 minute classes. Believe it or not, that
schedule derives from Victorian factories where industrialist Frederick Taylor
concluded that workers were most productive when they changed stations every 45
minutes.

And
it's not just the structure of schools that is chained to the past. It's the
very content we teach and our purpose for teaching it. This has been true for
at least a century, but the technological revolution has brought our schools to
the precipice; the mandate could not be more obvious: evolve or suffer extinction.
We are seeing more clearly than ever that school as we know it is becoming
irrelevant to an entire generation. Drop out rates remain high, especially here
in L.A., and far too many college students, who are ostensibly prepared, give
up before the end of their freshman year. Why? Because they're disengaged. Even
among our most educationally privileged, students arrive at college already
burned out and cynical about the journey ahead. If college means another four
years of primarily sitting and listening to someone else lecture, we've lost
them already.

Authentic
learning at its core is about doing, creating, constructing. Ask yourself,
"What do I remember as the most rewarding and inspiring experience in
school?" and the answer invariably involves something you created --
poetry you wrote, a computer program you designed, an art portfolio you
assembled, biology research you conducted. We learn by doing. Unfortunately, it
is a lot easier for a teacher to deliver information than it is to design a
lesson that deeply engages the learner and asks the student to transfer and
apply the skills and concepts of the course rather than simply memorizing them.

Teachers
no longer need to be the "black box" in which information is stored.
Instead, educators must become designers of doing. In this sense, teaching is a
highly skilled craft, requiring not only explicit objectives, but a beautifully
designed and irresistible learning experience that asks students think
critically, solve a problem, create a product. Take for example an
undergraduate course at MIT on designing a wheel chair for use in the
developing world. A real world, altruistic problem is posed and students are
challenged to solve it. Along the way, they must learn and employ the
chemistry, geometry, geography, cultural anthropology, physics, etc. to
prevail. Now that is relevance. Without doing likewise, our secondary schools
will remain penitentiaries of boredom -- places where our children sit
stupefied and often medicated so that they can remain silent and motionless
long enough for the lesson to be over.

Our
schools and teaching have to be worthy of a student's attention. I talk to
students about what it means to be fully present-- to "attend," which
comes from the Latin attendere, meaning to take care or take charge, to bend
toward. Attending means so much more than merely showing up and yet when we
utter the word in the context of school, it evokes passivity. Likewise,
learning has become synonymous with collecting information or possessing the
kind of knowledge that can be readily measured on a test. For those who are
college bound, that means a standardized test like the S.A.T. But the true test
of knowledge and understanding is applicability. Students want and deserve
knowledge which they can apply to an authentic experience. Don't get me wrong,
facts and content matter. But deep and enduring learning is always about more
than mnemonics, and it's time our schools and curricula reflect this.

Yes,
you need knowledge of the periodic table to do chemistry, but you don't need to
memorize it if it's on your desktop -- electronic or otherwise. What matters is
the ability to do something with the elements in the periodic table. But ask
yourself, what's easier to design: a fill in the blank test for recall or an
authentic chemistry experiment that may well have a messy outcome? This is just
one of the tragedies of No Child Left Behind, or as I like to call "No
Child Left Untested." Few experiences in life are less authentic than a
standardized test. The humble times-tables were once memorized by a sort of
chanted catechism; today, our youngest math students make lightning-fast
calculations on an array of electronic devices which, ironically, most
large-scale assessments forbid. Quick, what's 12 x 7? It's actually okay if you
don't remember, offhand, because you no longer have to. Isn't that great?

Educational
leaders have to have the courage to reinvent our schools for real this time.
And our teachers must be teachers of children as well as teachers of their
subject area. This means possessing pedagogical knowledge -- the tools in the
tool belt to design a lesson for the students of the present and the problems
of the future. Here's the bottom-line and the good news: the vast riches of the
world's cumulative knowledge are literally at our fingertips every day, via
tablet, desktop, laptop and cell-phone. True, there is such a thing as
classified information, not accessible via our search engines, and there is
plenty of misinformation on the web, too (for instance, I don't recommend that
you diagnose your own appendicitis, etc.) But still, if you're interested in
what the ancient Egyptians ate for breakfast, or how to carve a duck decoy, or
simply want to learn to speak Portuguese, a few persistent mouse-clicks will summon
this and virtually any other form of knowledge you desire, as if you have
conjured an obedient djinn from a magic lamp. It's all there for us, and we
don't have to remember much more than our new lexicon of user-names and
passwords to enter what truly is a wonderland of information impossible to
imagine a generation ago.

And
here's where our schools become relevant once more: in teaching our children to
evaluate and use that information in ways that are important and meaningful and
to satisfy their fundamental human desire to construct solutions for the world
full of engaging and pressing problems they will inherit.